Creation of the Labolero

Marie is a textile artist based in Warrington I responded to an open call to work with Marie for a day as a UK Arts Council funded ‘Develop your creative practice’ day and was fortunate enough to be accepted, we discussed practices and development in the morning and in the afternoon. Marie has a knitting machine which has been ‘hacked’ to enable images to be transferred into knitted fabric. I chose a to print a biofilm as described above. I chose pink and purple to reflect gram stain colours - which is a microbiological test. At the time, this was a purely experimental piece I hadn't made such as work before. The end result was a long sheet of biofilm-printed fabric. Later through crit discussions, this became an idea to make a biofilm lab coat, or an impractical lab coat as a collaboration with Marie. I gained approval to use a biofilm image from Dr Daire Contillon from the Liverpool School of tropical medicine and Marie was excited to collaborate and make it . Unfortunately due to Marie's availability, we will not be able to realise this by the end of my major project. After feedback from critique, that i shouldn't lose to the opportunity to make something with the test fabric, therefore even more impractical Labolero (a bolero) came into being.